6 ms·

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are

181 points by bcn 12y ago

danso 12y ago
This is a stunning report...not least of which in how it continues to show the NSA's apparently shoddy IT...the PowerPoint presentations being taken are one thing, but the hundreds of thousands of pieces of surveillance data, and that's just what the Post chose to sift through. Still, the specifics of data extraction aren't clear...are the NSA mining a data stream as they please from Facebook? Or are the Facebook transcripts, as detailed in the closing anecdote, a result of a data request in an ongoing investigation of a previously identified suspect?...which is, purportedly, the same kind of access any law enforcement agency can make.
- declan 12y ago
  The intercepts referenced in the Post article date from 2009 to 2012, and during substantially all this time Facebook chose not to force SSL by default. Facebook did not enable SSL by default until about only half a year before Edward Snowden went public: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/11/14/platform-updates--operation-developer-love/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/11/14/platfor... The absence of SSL and presence of plenty of fiber taps provides a pretty big big data stream to mine...
- nikcub 12y ago
  > This is a stunning report. Significance buried with poor headline, also could have been broken up into multiple stories. This is def a top 5 Snowden revelation, with the added bonus of a denial from a top official.
  - acqq 12y ago
    At least the way it's presented it appears as "nothing to see here." The main story is the guy who wants to join Talibans being monitored, including the conversations with his ex-partner who converted to Islam and who today understands that it was reasonable for such communication to be monitored. Kind of anticlimax for the claimed "a four-month investigation by The Washington Post." How could the article have been written to make the readers see it as "one of the top five?"
zachrose 12y ago
The infographic shows 556 intercepted videos out of 100,000 intercepted communications, the majority of which are text messages and email. So why aren't the terrorist evildoers hiding their few KB of text communications within multi-GB YouTube videos of cats and video games?
- nikcub 12y ago
  USA claim AQ have been using stenography since the 90s: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen... Commercial companies then built tools to identify most common steg, and AQ adapted by writing their own algorithms - which turned out to be not very good: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents-future/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents-f... It still breaks down, because you need to pre-share the arrangement of how you will exchange information that is hidden in images.
  - bradgessler 12y ago
    That really puts into perspective how huge Yo app is a threat to national security. It's only a matter of time until the NSA is intercepting Yos, or at least capturing Yo metadata.
    - miga 12y ago
      I bet a Yo takeover is coming within few months. Buying the company may cost less than hacking it...
      - drunkcatsdgaf 12y ago
        already got a insider - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-founder-hack-hires-hackers-chat-app http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-founder...
capnrefsmmat 12y ago
A funny line: > Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years. Barton Gellman clarified: > Lotta questions on this. The 1200 references to “minimized US president” come when people talk about him in intercepted conversations. https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986 https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986 So this doesn't confirm that the NSA was reading Obama's mail, like Russ Tice has claimed. But it does belie NSA's claims that Snowden had no access to FISA material, and cast doubt on all their "stringent" security procedures to prevent misuse of intelligence material. If Snowden could sneak out with it, what else could be done without their knowledge?
GabrielF00 12y ago
I have some methodological problems with this piece. They're making claims about the makeup of this data set, that 50% of the documents contain minimized references to US persons for instance, or that 90% of the account holders were not intelligence targets, but we don't actually know whether this data represents NSA collections as a whole. There are 160,000 documents over a four-year period. That seems far too low to be the sum total of all NSA collections, so it must be a sample. But is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some criteria? How do we know that Snowden didn't choose data from one particular program or using certain selectors and that that particular data tends to have more or less US persons or a higher or lower percentage of intelligence targets than NSA intercepts taken as a whole? I also find the following claim problematic: >> Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy... So there were 65,000 minimized references in 160,000 documents. But we also know that a "minimized reference" doesn't actually mean the a US person was the sender or the recipient - for instance, we know from Gellman that someone talking about President Obama would constitute a minimized reference. The first sentence, "Many of them were American" is not quantified, likely because the Post doesn't actually know how many participants in the intercepts were American.
- aragot 12y ago
  > Is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some criteria? Let's take one probable situation: Let's say Snowden took everything he could. That means there a gathering of data made by an employee at the NSA which results in 90% non-intelligence targets. What was the employee working on? - Increasing the relevance of data? Not probable. - Working on a usual sample of data? Most probable. - Targetting non-intelligence targets on purpose? Scary and illegal.
aw3c2 12y ago
Is it my bad understanding of the language or does the word "target" in headline mislead? I read it as "don't worry, the NSA does only target a minority" while the text starts with "Ordinary Internet users (...) far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted (...)" I would have added "legally", so it would read "In NSA-intercepted data, those not legally targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"
- lemming 12y ago
  Yes, this is a very confusing headline, and incorrectly appears to be reassuring. The Guardian's headline is better: "NSA intercepts: ordinary internet users 'far outnumbered' legal targets".
  - madaxe_again 12y ago
    Agreed. One would almost think they were trying to both publish and bury this story simultaneously, as the headline is practically unintelligible.
higherpurpose 12y ago
So out of billions they only "target" (whatever that means) hundreds of million of people? That doesn't make me feel a lot safer. The 9:1 thing is completely out of context and meaningless. Plus, we don't know exactly what a target is and what's a non-target (on which they could still gather data...just not, you know..."target it").
csandreasen 12y ago
I'm sure I'm going to take a karma hit, but please tell me if I'm getting any of this wrong, since it doesn't seem to mesh with a lot of the Snowden reporting: Snowden grabs a significant amount of the NSA's actual reporting and collection, hands it to the Washington Post and they find that: - The NSA is actively scrubbing the collection and removing the identities of Americans - The most egregious privacy violation that WaPo could find was a set of love letters between an Australian government employee and her boyfriend who went off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban - In the process of doing this, the NSA is pulling out information on "a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks" - The WaPo estimates that around 900k people's communications are caught up in the NSA's "incidental" collection I could see an argument made for future abuse, but this really seems to fly in the face of grand conspiracy theories that we've been seeing for the last year.
- node_pass_go 12y ago
  I agree. I think that if I was in possession of 11,000 accounts worth of NSA profiles I could definitely dig up something juicier. What we are seeing here is the other side of the story. The tracking of valid terrorists, monitoring overseas nuclear projects and military events etc. I have no doubt that this article is a heavily redacted view of things but any criticism of reform of the NSA has to accept the need for these kind of actions. Additionally, I hate how "the people" never hear about real intelligence that is of public concern (i.e. double-dealing by allies). What is the purpose of hiding this information from the public?
  - csandreasen 12y ago
    I suspect that both the government and media have disincentives for pushing out that kind of information. On the government side, you don't want to push out the fact that you're spying on them until the situation gets so big that it's worth potentially losing that source of information (e.g.: Iran/North Korea nuclear program, Chinese hackers, etc.) If your intelligence turns out to be bad, it could also backfire catastrophically (e.g.: Iraq WMDs). On the media side, government intelligence successes aren't going to garner many eyeballs unless it's something huge. It would be similar to publishing a constant stream of minor military successes - if anything, they read more like propaganda. You're going to get a lot more readers by scaring the people into thinking that an Orwellian surveillance state has been constructed around them than telling them about something happening on the other side of the world that won't actually have much impact on the Average Joe's day-to-day life. For the same reason, the government keeps falling back on terrorism as justification for spying since everyone was affected by 9-11 in one way or another instead of bringing up things like nuclear non-proliferation, trade agreements, intellectual property theft, etc.

181 points by bcn 12y ago

danso 12y ago

This is a stunning report...not least of which in how it continues to show the NSA's apparently shoddy IT...the PowerPoint presentations being taken are one thing, but the hundreds of thousands of pieces of surveillance data, and that's just what the Post chose to sift through. Still, the specifics of data extraction aren't clear...are the NSA mining a data stream as they please from Facebook? Or are the Facebook transcripts, as detailed in the closing anecdote, a result of a data request in an ongoing investigation of a previously identified suspect?...which is, purportedly, the same kind of access any law enforcement agency can make.

declan 12y ago
The intercepts referenced in the Post article date from 2009 to 2012, and during substantially all this time Facebook chose not to force SSL by default. Facebook did not enable SSL by default until about only half a year before Edward Snowden went public: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/11/14/platform-updates--operation-developer-love/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/11/14/platfor... The absence of SSL and presence of plenty of fiber taps provides a pretty big big data stream to mine...
nikcub 12y ago
> This is a stunning report. Significance buried with poor headline, also could have been broken up into multiple stories. This is def a top 5 Snowden revelation, with the added bonus of a denial from a top official.
- acqq 12y ago
  At least the way it's presented it appears as "nothing to see here." The main story is the guy who wants to join Talibans being monitored, including the conversations with his ex-partner who converted to Islam and who today understands that it was reasonable for such communication to be monitored. Kind of anticlimax for the claimed "a four-month investigation by The Washington Post." How could the article have been written to make the readers see it as "one of the top five?"

zachrose 12y ago

The infographic shows 556 intercepted videos out of 100,000 intercepted communications, the majority of which are text messages and email. So why aren't the terrorist evildoers hiding their few KB of text communications within multi-GB YouTube videos of cats and video games?

nikcub 12y ago
USA claim AQ have been using stenography since the 90s: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen... Commercial companies then built tools to identify most common steg, and AQ adapted by writing their own algorithms - which turned out to be not very good: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents-future/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/30/world/al-qaeda-documents-f... It still breaks down, because you need to pre-share the arrangement of how you will exchange information that is hidden in images.
- bradgessler 12y ago
  That really puts into perspective how huge Yo app is a threat to national security. It's only a matter of time until the NSA is intercepting Yos, or at least capturing Yo metadata.
  - miga 12y ago
    I bet a Yo takeover is coming within few months. Buying the company may cost less than hacking it...
    - drunkcatsdgaf 12y ago
      already got a insider - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-founder-hack-hires-hackers-chat-app http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/23/yo-founder...

capnrefsmmat 12y ago

A funny line: > Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years. Barton Gellman clarified: > Lotta questions on this. The 1200 references to “minimized US president” come when people talk about him in intercepted conversations. https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986 https://twitter.com/bartongellman/status/485604791867817986 So this doesn't confirm that the NSA was reading Obama's mail, like Russ Tice has claimed. But it does belie NSA's claims that Snowden had no access to FISA material, and cast doubt on all their "stringent" security procedures to prevent misuse of intelligence material. If Snowden could sneak out with it, what else could be done without their knowledge?

GabrielF00 12y ago

I have some methodological problems with this piece. They're making claims about the makeup of this data set, that 50% of the documents contain minimized references to US persons for instance, or that 90% of the account holders were not intelligence targets, but we don't actually know whether this data represents NSA collections as a whole. There are 160,000 documents over a four-year period. That seems far too low to be the sum total of all NSA collections, so it must be a sample. But is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some criteria? How do we know that Snowden didn't choose data from one particular program or using certain selectors and that that particular data tends to have more or less US persons or a higher or lower percentage of intelligence targets than NSA intercepts taken as a whole? I also find the following claim problematic: >> Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy... So there were 65,000 minimized references in 160,000 documents. But we also know that a "minimized reference" doesn't actually mean the a US person was the sender or the recipient - for instance, we know from Gellman that someone talking about President Obama would constitute a minimized reference. The first sentence, "Many of them were American" is not quantified, likely because the Post doesn't actually know how many participants in the intercepts were American.

aragot 12y ago
> Is it a random sample or was this data selected by Snowden using some criteria? Let's take one probable situation: Let's say Snowden took everything he could. That means there a gathering of data made by an employee at the NSA which results in 90% non-intelligence targets. What was the employee working on? - Increasing the relevance of data? Not probable. - Working on a usual sample of data? Most probable. - Targetting non-intelligence targets on purpose? Scary and illegal.

aw3c2 12y ago

Is it my bad understanding of the language or does the word "target" in headline mislead? I read it as "don't worry, the NSA does only target a minority" while the text starts with "Ordinary Internet users (...) far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted (...)" I would have added "legally", so it would read "In NSA-intercepted data, those not legally targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"

lemming 12y ago
Yes, this is a very confusing headline, and incorrectly appears to be reassuring. The Guardian's headline is better: "NSA intercepts: ordinary internet users 'far outnumbered' legal targets".
- madaxe_again 12y ago
  Agreed. One would almost think they were trying to both publish and bury this story simultaneously, as the headline is practically unintelligible.

higherpurpose 12y ago

So out of billions they only "target" (whatever that means) hundreds of million of people? That doesn't make me feel a lot safer. The 9:1 thing is completely out of context and meaningless. Plus, we don't know exactly what a target is and what's a non-target (on which they could still gather data...just not, you know..."target it").

csandreasen 12y ago

I'm sure I'm going to take a karma hit, but please tell me if I'm getting any of this wrong, since it doesn't seem to mesh with a lot of the Snowden reporting: Snowden grabs a significant amount of the NSA's actual reporting and collection, hands it to the Washington Post and they find that: - The NSA is actively scrubbing the collection and removing the identities of Americans - The most egregious privacy violation that WaPo could find was a set of love letters between an Australian government employee and her boyfriend who went off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban - In the process of doing this, the NSA is pulling out information on "a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks" - The WaPo estimates that around 900k people's communications are caught up in the NSA's "incidental" collection I could see an argument made for future abuse, but this really seems to fly in the face of grand conspiracy theories that we've been seeing for the last year.

node_pass_go 12y ago
I agree. I think that if I was in possession of 11,000 accounts worth of NSA profiles I could definitely dig up something juicier. What we are seeing here is the other side of the story. The tracking of valid terrorists, monitoring overseas nuclear projects and military events etc. I have no doubt that this article is a heavily redacted view of things but any criticism of reform of the NSA has to accept the need for these kind of actions. Additionally, I hate how "the people" never hear about real intelligence that is of public concern (i.e. double-dealing by allies). What is the purpose of hiding this information from the public?
- csandreasen 12y ago
  I suspect that both the government and media have disincentives for pushing out that kind of information. On the government side, you don't want to push out the fact that you're spying on them until the situation gets so big that it's worth potentially losing that source of information (e.g.: Iran/North Korea nuclear program, Chinese hackers, etc.) If your intelligence turns out to be bad, it could also backfire catastrophically (e.g.: Iraq WMDs). On the media side, government intelligence successes aren't going to garner many eyeballs unless it's something huge. It would be similar to publishing a constant stream of minor military successes - if anything, they read more like propaganda. You're going to get a lot more readers by scaring the people into thinking that an Orwellian surveillance state has been constructed around them than telling them about something happening on the other side of the world that won't actually have much impact on the Average Joe's day-to-day life. For the same reason, the government keeps falling back on terrorism as justification for spying since everyone was affected by 9-11 in one way or another instead of bringing up things like nuclear non-proliferation, trade agreements, intellectual property theft, etc.